For a few years, SumUp was in a race it could have lost. On the other side stood Payleven, a rival with the same idea, the same little card reader, and the money of Rocket Internet behind it.
Marc-Alexander Christ, one of SumUp's co-founders, later put it plainly in a German interview: the merger with Payleven got the company out of its fight for survival. That is not the sentence founders usually say in public, and it is the best clue to the shape of the story.
That is not the sentence founders usually say in public, and it is the best clue to the shape of the story.
SumUp was conceived in 2011 and founded in 2012, with a first product in August. Five people stood behind it: Christ, Daniel Klein, Stefan Jeschonnek, Jan Deepen and Petter Made. Klein came with an earlier scar and an earlier win, having helped found Moneybookers, later renamed Skrill. Before any Series A, the founders funded the company themselves.
The five did not stay five. Made left the operating business at the end of 2013, and Deepen and Jeschonnek followed in the summer of 2014. All remained shareholders. Founding partnerships tend to thin out before the real money arrives, and this one was no exception.
The turn came in April 2016. SumUp and Payleven merged. It was called a merger, but the SumUp brand won, Klein became chief executive of the combined business, and all Payleven merchants were migrated onto SumUp's technology. Payleven's co-founder Konstantin Wolff joined as marketing chief. The race was over.
After that, SumUp could grow without looking over its shoulder. It bought the e-commerce platform Shoplo in 2019. In 2020 and 2021 it bought Goodtill, Tiller and Paysolut, and paid $317 million for the loyalty startup Fivestars. Not everything worked. A Chile venture with Banco del Estado was taken over wholly by the bank by September 2020.
By 2022 it had about 3,000 staff in 23 locations and more than 3.5 million merchants across over 30 markets. A June 2022 round of EUR590 million valued it at around EUR8 billion, and in May 2024 Goldman Sachs led a EUR1.5 billion raise.
What can a first-time founder take from this? Sometimes the strongest move in a race is to stop racing the person who looks like you. SumUp's founders, who had started with their own money, were ready to share the stage with a better-funded rival and let the best product win. Few founders would admit, as Christ did, that the deal had been survival.